From the “we told you so time and again department”, Canadian weather data is a mess. It took an FOIA to get the “fess up” out in the open. Anybody got a copy of the EC report? So far all we have is press reports.
See our WUWT report below, it isn’t just Canada that is in the red with poor data. Though you can see a vast swath of red and lots of missing grey area in Canada.
GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought
From the Financial Post
Sustained cuts to Environment Canada weather-service programs have compromised the government’s ability to assess climate change and left it with a “profoundly disturbing” quality of information in its data network, says a newly released internal government report.
“The common assumption among users is that the data has been observed accurately, checked for mistakes and stored properly,” said the report, printed in June 2008. “It is profoundly disturbing to discover the true state of our climate data network and the data we offer to ourselves and the real world.”
The stinging assessment, obtained through an access-to-information request, suggests that Canada’s climate network infrastructure is getting progressively worse and no longer meets international guidelines.
Key findings in the report:
• Automatic precipitation sensors are subject to significant and well-known errors, which have significantly compromised the integrity of Canada’s precipitation data;
• National coverage of certain climate elements, such as hours of bright sunshine, have been effectively terminated;
• Human quality control of climate data ceased as of April 1, 2008. Automated quality control is essentially non-existent. There is no program in place to prevent erroneous data from entering the national climate archive;
• Climate data, which could be gathered at minimal additional cost, is not being gathered due to lack of funds;
• Climate data, which could be gathered with minimal additional effort, is not being gathered due to lack of personnel;
• Some existing data, which needs to be interpreted and processed before being placed into the national archive, is being ignored due to lack of resources;
• A significant portion of the volunteer climate network will likely be lost due to a decision on the part of the Meteorological Service of Canada to discontinue processing paper forms and to emphasize electronic input;
• Clients of Environment Canada (both internal and external) cannot obtain the information they need. This has significant implications for programs carried out by all levels of government, the private sector and the international scientific community; and
• Lack of resources and delayed quality control of climate data have resulted in updates of Intensity/Duration/Frequency curves that proceed in fits and starts. Systematic and regular updates are desired by the engineering community in order to design public infrastructure (roads, buildings, sewers) that will be able to cope with severe storms and phenomena associated with changing climate.
• These issues are widely recognized by staff within the department, and are becoming increasingly obvious to outside partners and clients, damaging morale within and credibility outside the department.
Source: Degradation in Environment Canada’s Climate Network, Quality Control and Data Storage Practices: A Call to Repair the Damage. June 2008.
Obviously, the more bureaucrats they hire, the better Environment Canada does its job. That’s the way it works everywhere, right?
/sarc
Looking at that map and looking at those red things over northern Scandinavia. Well…
SMHI runes a daily service where one can see temperature for each day and an average for the whole month starting from the first day of the month.
http://www.smhi.se/sgn0102/maps/avv_day_201003.htm
Swedish lesson: “Daglig temperaturavvikelse, Mars 2010” reads “Daily temperature deviation from average , Mars 2010”
And: http://www.smhi.se/sgn0102/maps/avv_month_201003.htm
Swedish lesson: “Temperaturavvikelsen från den första till aktuell dag, Mars 2010” reads ”Temperature deviation from the first day to the current day, mars 2010”
So there we can see that in the in circled area over Scandinavia there must be an error. We were close to average. Hopefully they have corrected it and not counted that.
/Sven Hagström
Paul Vaughan @ur momisugly August 23, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Climate has nothing to do with left/right politics. Many of us are putting our political orientations completely aside as we explore the mysteries of natural climate variations. Politics: a complete bore
Certainly climate has nothing to do with politics; but government bureaucracies are inherently political.
Following the Climategate revelations about the poor state of the historic global temperature record and the recent Satellitegate scandal, which puts much doubt on the veracity of their temperature data record, this new Canadagate fiasco will be the final straw.
Even die-hard believers in the failed CAGW conjecture must now admit that the evidence for global warming it not fit for purpose. In the mean time weather/climate continues to oscillate up and down in an unpredictable way to the rhythm of the energy delivered by our variable sun.
I don’t know what all the fuss is about. There are lots of trees in Canada and we have several world renowned scientists who will be able to tell us the exact temperature (to 2 places of decimals) using tree ring proxy data. Who needs actual measurements?
Lark says:
August 23, 2010 at 11:20 pm
Obviously, the more bureaucrats they hire, the better Environment Canada does its job. That’s the way it works everywhere, right?
/sarc
I see it all the time, 4, 5 or 6 managers and 1 engineer.
This is how civilizations fall.
There seems to be a connection between a.) the number of jobs, and perks, and benefits, and gizzmos used, and b.) the quality of the of the products the employees produce. As a.) goes up b.) goes down. And as a.) goes down b.) goes down. There just has to be something wrong in a.) to make b.) always go down.
This plays well with the Concervative neo-con base in Alberta.
They think that by eliminating the data they can eliminate the problem. That won’t work.
One wonders who is paying the salaries of the 28 new Canadian experts selected by IPCC as lead authors,co-ordinating lead authors and review editors for the 5th Assessment Report. While everyone is focused on man induced minor global warming , natural planetary cycles will cool the planet in a major way for the next many years. Strange world we live in when our priorities are so mixed up .
http://ec.gc.ca/sc-cs/default.asp?lang=En&n=45A00F81-1
So the rub here is the report date: 2008. And it took this long, with a FOIR, to get a copy of it? What a stupendous surprise. Let me back-cast this scenario. Someone reports that climate information sources are bad. A commission was authorized to do a report on the condition of climate data. When the report was done, the commission was disbanded because it met the obligations of the process. Most governments are process oriented, not results oriented. Once reports are done, everyone goes home, confident and happy in the knowledge that reports were done.
Report notes stored apples are bad. Apples continue to be stored and then when shipped out to grocery stores, reports note apples are bad. Everybody goes home confident and happy in the…
You don’t suppose that somewhere in the bowls of the US government, there is a report about bad eggs a few years back?
Sven Hagström says:
August 23, 2010 at 11:58 pm
“….So there we can see that in the in circled area over Scandinavia there must be an error…”
The circle on the map is a little misleading. Your focus of attention should be on the gray area in Canada for which no temperature values were measured.
Your comment implies that if we can measure temperature deviations from an average monthly trend on Mars, then it should be possible to do it here at home, and that, hopefully, it will be done correctly.
The question is one of relative importance or respective priorities. For either location more money would have to be spent to be more correct. On Earth it would be necessary to calculate temperature deviations to at least the same accuracy as is being done for Mars. Would that be reasonable? What level of accuracy is required?
That depends on what harm would result if temperature deviations were not measured or were measured somewhat inadequately. It also depends on who is affected. No-one lives on Mars; no harm can be done there. Hardly anyone lives in the gray area in Canada that is shown on the map; hardly any harm can be done there.
It boils down to the question of whether we can afford to and should spend money on measuring and forecasting the weather where no or extremely few people live. Would the funds required for that be a luxury or a necessity?
So far, it was politics that came into play in convincing people to pay the taxes of which a portion was used to do weather monitoring and forecasting at the level of quality we have become accustomed to for an area in which hardly anyone lives. My guess is that there will not be an improvement in the accuracy of weather monitoring and forecasting until someone can demonstrate that the priority for that needs to rank higher than, say, the lives of migratory waterfowl or, say, the adequate and assured quality of health-care services that will prevent people now in their fifties from experiencing a drop in their average life-expectancy.
Yes, I know, Paul, (Paul Vaughan @ur momisugly August 23, 2010 at 7:11 pm), “Climate has nothing to do with left/right politics.” However, how we react to the vagaries of the climate is governed primarily by two things, by our wishes to be comfortable and secure from all harmful influences of the weather, and by our ability and will to do what is necessary to cope with and adapt to the weather so as to ensure the level of comfort we desire.
We cannot react instantaneously to anything the weather throws at us. Some planning is required for things that need to be done hours, days, weeks, months and even years ahead. For that we need forecasting of an adequate level of accuracy, because both, the forecasting and the planning, will permit us to be approximately right about the future instead of being exactly wrong. We would be exactly wrong if we were to neither monitor the weather nor forecast it nor plan for it.
It takes a communal effort to determine how important it is to be comfortable compared to barely surviving or perhaps to perish. It takes a communal effort to provide the funds and to do the work required to do better than subsistence levels of survival. It takes the manufacturing of concern for the assigning of priorities, and that takes and affects politics.
Many of the participants in this discussion thread live by the maxim “Publish or Perish.” It seems to me, that maxim reflects a jaded view of reality. A more realistic and vitally important maxim for climate scientists is: “Without politics, jobs in climate science will wither.”
Rattus Norvegicus says:
August 23, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Well, what else can you expect when budgets have been cut to the bone?
—————-
What bone? I thought government was populated by spineless invertebrates, especially the department of redundancy department.
For those following Canadian Weather records it is worth a visit to Canadian Surface Temperatures as site created by Richard Wakefield. His work at analyzing temperature trends is worth a look. He makes it clear how difficult it is to support the stance of EC about CAGW.
http://cdnsurfacetemps.blogspot.com/
IMO his work is first class and deserves to be noted.
In particular dig out his short note on “infilling” temperature records. It is a bit of an eye-opener for those uneducated in “estimating”, interpolation and extrapolation and ties in neatly with the commentary on the southern ocean.
Cheers
About fifty years ago I came to the considered professional opinion that GDP was no more than an announcement of a best guess, and that only after a little political massage has been applied. The reason for that is too much data, double counted data, unprocurable data, inaccurate data, uncheckable data and deliberate manipulation of data by in-putters for manifest reasons. I have had no reason to change my opinion of GDP numbers in the intervening years, regardless of the country from which they come. When I started to take an interest in the climate argument a couple of years ago, what first struck me as the fundamental problem? Data. There is far too much of it for it to be subject to meaningful quality control and serious errors are a certainty. Data sampling error. The data that is available is not evenly distributed around the pudding, nor around its different altitudes. This doubtful data is then subjected to the averaging of meaningless averages.
I don’t wish to hurt anyone’s feelings but it seems to me that climatology has a long way to go before it can call itself a science.
” Robert says:
Maybe it’s because Stephen Harper has completely ignored the environment and wants nothing to do with “greenie” type things such as research…”
The weather station outside Broadview Saskatchewan and many of the others closed (budgets being shifted away from “collecting actual weather data across Canada” to environmental advocacy in Ontario, Quebec and BC) long before Stephen Harper was anywhere near the throne in Ottawa. Feel free to try again though.
Oh and the reduction in yields this year will be showing themselves in your Supermarkets this winter. Enjoy the fruits of AGW’s cooling effects on the Canadian prairies. Prices at the farmer’s markets won’t change much here but those of you elsewhere are in for a real spike but its not all bad news, not being able to dine as freely will certainly force carbon footprints into tighter shoes.
evanmjones says:
August 23, 2010 at 6:56 pm
We need a new acronym: IWTWT (It’s Worse Than We Thought).
I think we should all run around going “Oh NOAAs!”
With a land area greater than that of USA, Canada is represented in GHCN by only a handful of small towns with reasonably intact records spanning the last century. What is really disturbing is that these records are not consistently updated, leaving mostly large cities or suspect records for the current geographic coverage.
E.g., Sydney NS completely drops out after 1995. The subsequent years in that region are covered only by the much-fragmented record at Port-aux-Basque and the airport record at Sable Island. Apparently, GHCN would have us believe that there was an airport there in 1900 and that the loss of consistent datum-level at the former station can be accurately compensated. That’s how spurious trends are created!
I’m really surprised you are surprised by that news.
It’s been a debate for about a year (if not more) in the weather community in Canada after the current administration (a government in Canada), had cuts 100% of all the climate research funding – closing all agencies working on that issue (that was not only EC’s budget). Once one of the most renown climate bureau or agency in the world – the ESCER – was about to be shutdown soon.
Since then part of it has been re-financed by some provincial gov. like Ontario and Quebec – see : See : http://www.escer.uqam.ca/presse/gazette-13juillet2010.pdf
Actually all the $$$ that used to be spent on climate will now be used to allow more fossils fuel research in the northern ter. (Nunavut) and near the polar circle. No words on who will look at the pollution from the crude sands in Alberta – no more budget for the polution inspectors as well, of course… Who needs those disturbent agent near our oil fields.
If it was just a climate mather, i think many Canadians would not care much. But the cuts at the services doing the daily weather forecast and monitoring is something really bad that will have huge economic impacts (poor forecasting) down the road, and will cost lives (more delay to have weather watchs, warnings, alerts). Actually Env. Canada cannot tell about severe weather if no one tells them on site what is currently happening in the fields. If it was not for the growing storm chasers community, no one at EC would be able to tell and warn other people down the path of a storm what is coming down on them shortly.
This year alone i reported two tornado. On the first one there was not even a weather watch, and on the second one it was only a watch (not a sever weather watch) – and that storm had already produced hail and heavy rain downpour upstream, criteria for severe weather warnings/alerts anywhere else.
So when your equipements is failing, your radar network is outdated, your tools are not giving you the right information – continue to blame the poor forecaster or the guy trying to do his job on the severe weather bench. But the real problem is the $$$ needed to run such service, and the current administration does not want to spend a dime for such critical service.
Someone mentionned about paying for the service… Actually you have to pay for most of the EC’s services beside local weather. Something as stupid as the lightning data is not available in real time if you don’t pay for it. Lucky for my, i live near the US border and there’s a US radar that can tell me what kind of weather is coming in my area – the local EC Radar has been down for the past 1.5 years and has just restart three months ago, but is still experiencing outages.
The problem with EC’s weather services, is mostly because EC is doing other things not related to weather – not much of EC’s budget is going to the weather. This might be very strange for any US reader – but in Canada we still don’t have a network to warn the people of bad weather coming in, there’s no warning system whatsoever. There will be one soon, but it will be done by the private sector, and guess what – we’ll have to pay for it. Thanks to Harper and the ultra conservative boys running that country on behalf of the western oil industrial cartel – Power corporation strawman or M. Desmarais’s personnal strawman. As someone said, they really believe that if you can’t show there’s a problem, then there’s no problem. And the biggest irrony is, Harper is betting on the newly available Arctic natural ressources, while at the same time rejecting the idea of GW. But to be able to extract anything from the Arctic soil and sea, he will badly need the GW to happen. That’s how stupid and short view the guy really is.
Having looked closely at the Canada data, I’m not surprised. It’s pretty rough.
I would point out that two of the other red areas on the map up top are Turkey and Pakistan. Now in Pakistan we have bright red in areas that the government freely admits it doesn’t even have control. Just how good are THOSE readings going to be? And for Turkey, we have a peer reviewed paper by the Turkish Meteorologists saying that if you use ALL their stations instead of just the few cherry picked for GHCN you find Turkey is cooling, not warming….
So what we are finding is what I’ve been “on about” for a while now. “Global Warming” is all about bad data quality.
Regg_upnorth says:
August 24, 2010 at 5:17 pm ….
We all know that the previous governement signed the Kyoto treaty and talked the good talk, was loved all over the AGW and IPCC world, but what was the actual result? Is it true that CO2 emission went up (not down) 30% in that time, and that there is absolutely no chance that Canada can adhere to Kyoto?
Ed_B says:
August 23, 2010 at 3:29 pm
Just get rid of the useless ‘stations’.
Reckon they are working on this based upon the way ‘stations’ are dying off.
satellites will do the job infinitely better.
As for the satellites… there is no way to verify the results… no checks and balances like http://www.surfacestations.org and there is no way they will be able to keep their hands off the data.
If the satellites and land stations are in close agreement then you know the data are in big trouble.
If the satellites are owned, operated and processed by the powers that be then you know the data is being baked.
If you asked me to choose between TREES, SATELLITES or GISS then I would still go with the TREES… because trees don’t lie – they are only be misunderstood.
REPLY: Sensor failures are a regular occurrence on all satellite systems. This is overhyped IMO. – Anthony
This is underhyped IMO.
Magic Java has been blocked from verifying the Aqua-AMSU data… unless the appeal against their FOIA decision is upheld: http://magicjava.blogspot.com
Leading US Physicist Labels Satellitegate Scandal a ‘Catastrophe’
http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/22385.html
To Alexej Buergin
Look at the same data (CO2 Level and emission) by province. You will understand that it is not possible to achieve with Alberta in. If you put Alberta out, then we would already be below the line for CO2 emission – or about.
Now, whose from Alberta, and whose managing the country, then see what decision the gov. is taking. Kyoto has never been implemented thankfully to the same guy because the only place where it would had hurt is Alberta.
Next time you go on Modis , take a good look at the fields surrounding our beautiful oil sands production area. What a nice place to live.
There is a reason that the Canadian data is pretty “rough”:
The Trans-Canada Highway was officially opened by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker at a ceremony in Roger’s Pass, British Columbia on September 3, 1962.
http://transcanadahighway.com/general/transcanadahighway.htm
A lot of the country was not accessible in the time that we would have liked to have thermometers spread about. True we had the train from east to west but the coverage for transportation routes was not as good as it is now. Many Northern communities are only or more easily serviced by air.
Most of the population is in the south near the US border.
So guilty — but with a reason.
Reminds me of this amazing Climategate piece by Rex Murphy (The National – CBC Canada)
“You wouldn’t accept that at a grade 9 science fair…”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/03/you-wouldnt-accept-that-at-a-grade-9-science-fair-cbc-finds-a-moment-of-clarity/
Oh Canada.